As soon as a connection request is received, Alligate gets to work and attempts to identify the intent of the sender. Alligate performs various checks and throws various roadblocks into the process at each step in the SMTP transaction. We give the spammer every opportunity to go away on their own, and go away quickly. Years of study and experience in this area enables us to identify spammer tactics and actually use their own tactics against them.

MXRate - All connections are checked against our proprietary sender reputation database. Depending on the senders reputation, they might be blacklisted, greylisted, or tarpitted for a number of seconds. The MXRate score is also used add negative or positive points to the message for later evaluation.

Greylisting - This is an extremely effective way to discourage automated spammers. While several other products have implemented Greylisting as a spam defense, only Alligate lets you specify rules that are used to determine when to enforce Greylisting.

DNS Blacklists and Reverse DNS Lookups - Each connection is subject to additional tests to try to determine the senders legitimacy factor. The results of these checks can add additional tarpit seconds, or can help us determine whether or not we want to subject the sender to Greylisting.

Tarpitting - Alligate uses an extremely effective proprietary form of tarpitting to “discourage” spammers and attempt to get them to disconnect on their own. Unlike other implementations, Alligate uses tarpitting in a totally dynamic way. Depending on the message and sender, tarpitting delays can be inserted at any point in the SMTP conversation and for varying amounts of time. This means that it will be unlikely that legitimate senders will ever be affected negatively, while still imposing tarpit delays where they are most effective..

Command Analysis - Alligate analyzes the content and structure of every command received from a sender. Unusual formatting or improper structure are flagged and used in the overall analysis.